If you work on statistical or mathematical text, you probably find it tedious to have to open Excel 97's Format Cells dialogue box every time you need a subscript or superscript. Unfortunately, there's no toolbar button for this task. And you can't create a macro to apply subscript or superscript formatting to selected characters because a macro can't be executed while a cell is being edited. I developed an add-in for Excel 97 that you may find helpful. The JWalk SuperSub add-in displays a dialogue box that makes it easy to apply superscript, subscript, bold, italic, and font size formats to characters in a cell. You will find a free copy of this add-in at www.j-walk.com/ss/excel/files/supersub.htm and on our cover CD. Look for the self-extracting file supersub.exe. After downloading and extracting the add-in, select Tools–Add-Ins in Excel, click Browse to locate the supersub.xla add-in file (which the installer places on the desktop), and click OK. To use this new tool, highlight a cell, then select Tools–JWalk SuperSub. The dialogue box displays the cell's characters seven at a time. Click the arrow buttons to move through the characters, select one to format, then use the dialogue box controls to apply a format. Check the In-cell preview box to see how the formatting looks. – John Walkenbach
Simplify subscript and superscript formatting
Category: spreadsheet
Issue: May 1998
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